Panel at Brown University discusses transparency and privacy in light of massive NSA snooping disclosures

Thursday

Dec 5, 2013 at 12:01 AM

PROVIDENCE — In the wake of this year’s revelations about the federal government’s wide-ranging phone and Internet surveillance programs, panel discussions including federal officials, a civil rights...

By PHILIP MARCELO

PROVIDENCE — In the wake of this year’s revelations about the federal government’s wide-ranging phone and Internet surveillance programs, panel discussions including federal officials, a civil rights lawyer and leading journalists gathered at Brown University on Wednesday to consider what it means for the future of transparency and privacy.

Panelists said the disclosures — many of which came to light through classified documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden — reinforced how essential communications technology have become in everyday life.

They also revealed how sophisticated some government agencies had become in analyzing communications data.

“We live in a world where we are constantly leaving electronic trails showing who we have been in contact with and where we have physically traveled,” said Charlie Savage, a reporter for The New York Times. “The ability of incredibly powerful computers to store, search and make sense of the bulk data exists in a way that only a few years ago was technically infeasible. And we’re not going back anytime soon.”

“The intelligence community is not designed and built for transparency,” said Alexander W. Joel, who works in National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper’s office. “Our culture is around finding our adversaries secrets and keeping our own secrets secret. So when it comes to transparency, that is a culture shift for us. It’s going to take time.”

John DeLong, compliance director for the National Security Agency, said the recent disclosures do not always reflect changes already in place.

“Sometimes stories come out and you see them in 2013, but they talk about events that happened in 2009,” DeLong said. “We have not sat idle.”

But Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, took a more critical view.

“Part of what I find most troubling is not that the government was withholding things from us,” he said. “But that the government was misleading us about what was going on.”

Panelists also questioned how effective new oversight and transparency efforts can be.

“You have systems that really aren’t transparent even to the NSA themselves,” said Siobhan Gorman, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. “How can you be transparent to the court, or to Congress, or to the public or anybody?”

DeLong, of the NSA, at one point responded to the concerns: “The driving force here is not to collect. The driving force is to close a seam exposed with [the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001]. That’s what the whole program is designed to do. If there is a better way of doing it, we are open to it.”

What ultimately comes out of the public debate and ongoing revelations about the spying programs is hard to say, the panelists said.

Ending broad collection of data from American civilians will likely not happen anytime soon, said Ellen Nakashima, a reporter for The Washington Post.

But creation of a “public advocate” within the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or, perhaps, a civilian leader at the helm of the NSA, which has been long run by military leaders, are possible, she offered.

“Whatever the new status quo is,” said Savage, of The New York Times, “it will be more legitimate than what we have been living in now.”